Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This is a photo-documentary study of two themes found within the literature on fabulous appearances: the gay nightclub patron and the club DJ. This study used a large Midwestern gay nightclub as the field setting. Fabulousness involves the way patrons costume themselves in order to communicate status within the setting. This study revealed that participants in the setting utilize three different types of self-presentation. These types embody desirable characteristics and ideas of attractiveness that revolve around power, establishing a normalized “gay” identity, and using surreal based characteristics to achieve their goal of being noticed. The DJs served as informal organizers through their appearances and performances. Analysis of the DJ role found that DJs provide visual cues for other participants in the setting on how to act, dance, dress, and behave. This study is the first in depth examination of the role of the DJ and the communicative processes between the DJ and dancers in gay nightclubs.

Revising Yeats's rhetorical question, this dissertation asks: "How can we tell the dancer from the music?" In the early twentieth century Isadora Duncan and her barefoot protégées initiated a performance tradition that would later be recognized as American modern dance. They did this, to a great extent, by embodying European "absolute music." Soon, however, choreographers and dancers of this new art form faced modernist calls for medium-specific "absolute dance" that would express movement's autonomy and not the autonomous music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. As John Martin, one of the nation's first dance critics, wrote in 1933, "There is a long, sad story to be told about the use of music for dancing which was never intended to be danced to." Today that story is even longer; contra Martin, it is not sad. As the use of classical music was a primary component in the earliest forms of "free dance" and as it remains in some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful modern dance today, this use is in need of critical and historical attention. Tracing an alternative genealogy from Duncan's then-scandalous embodied empathy with sacralized art music, the central chapters of this study of the use of music in American modern dance focus on the lives, works, and reception of two choreographers: Ted Shawn and Merce Cunningham. Both of these men founded his own dance company and created works where choreomusicality, or the relationship between music and dance, remained especially vital. For Shawn, wishing to go even further than Duncan, this meant creating choreographies where dance followed the music as closely as possible. Indeed, in his "music visualizations" (a term that he coined with his wife and colleague Ruth St. Denis) his goal was to create dances that were perfect translations of the music itself. Such translation is ultimately impossible, and in attempting it, I argue, Shawn ended up revealing more of himself--specifically, his desire to perform a non-conventional masculinity that he normally felt was off-limits--than he did of the music. Reacting against this tradition--the standard history of modern dance goes--was Merce Cunningham, in whose mature choreographies music and dance are united only by their overall duration. Yet Cunningham, under the influence of Cage, created several dances to the music of Satie that provide an illuminating exception to this practice. I focus in particular on Idyllic Song (1944) and Second Hand (1970), both of which Cunningham choreographed to Satie's Socrate. Though created during his artistic maturity, Second Hand provides a link to the earliest self-expressive collaborations with John Cage. As a result, this choreography offers an unusual window into the Cage-Cunningham personal and professional relationship. In examining Shawn's and Cunningham's choreography, this dissertation tracks not only the changing role of Western art music in the relatively young art form of modern dance but also examines these choreographers' responses to contemporary attitudes toward the male dancer, unconventional masculinities, and the relatively new identity of the homosexual. In doing so I demonstrate how the choreomusicalities of these men reflected and refracted their masculinities and homosexualities. In addition to providing choreomusical analysis and interpretation, I revise current understandings of both specific scores and choreographies through intensive archival research (from silent films of Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, which I have synchronized with their unheard music, to Cage-Cunningham manuscripts ignored or previously thought lost), observation of live and recorded rehearsals and performances, and interviews. Ultimately, "The Dancer from the Music" seeks to establish choreomusicality as an exemplary lens through which to view the meeting of music's ineffability with the realities and identities of listening and performing bodies in motion.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.Mus)-University of Natal, Durban, 1984.

<p><italic>Composers on the Decks</italic> is comprised of three related chapters: an original composition for amplified chamber ensemble and laptop DJ, <italic>Alleys Of Your Mind</italic>; an extended article entitled "Composers on the Decks: Hybridity of Place and Practice among Composer-DJs Gabriel Prokofiev, Mason Bates, Ari Benjamin Meyers and Brandt Brauer Frick"; and an archive of edited interviews of the four primary research subjects. Chapter 1 is the author's artistic contribution. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the emerging practices of "club classical" and what I am calling "instrumental-electronic dance music" in what may be the first academic study to examine the latter and its connections with the former.</p><p><italic>Alleys of Your Mind</italic> is a work for seven wind instruments, soprano and laptop DJ composed as social dance music, intended to be performed in a nightclub. Its repetitive style, electronic dance beats and long-form instrumental writing create a musical hybrid of classical compositional techniques and electronic dance music (EDM). The work contains three movements: the first and longest movement is paced at a dance tempo of 124 beats-per-minute; the second movement at half of that speed, 62 beats-per-minute; and Movement 3 returns to the original tempo. The movements are performed without pause and leave generous space for the DJ to improvise with audio effects and an extended interlude in Movement 2. In addition, <italic>Alleys Of Your Mind</italic> has a documentary dimension: audio samples of medical machinery and voices, recorded by the composer during his recovery in a neuroscience intensive care unit, feature in the second and third movements. </p><p>Chapter 2 introduces the related practices of "club classical" and "instrumental-EDM," explaining the musical connections between contemporary classical and EDM and interpreting the hybrid social environments where this music lives. The first section deals with the club classical phenomenon in the practices of composer-DJs Gabriel Prokofiev and Mason Bates, and presenters such as Yellow Lounge. Prokofiev leads Nonclassical Records and hosts monthly club nights in London, during which live sets of recent classical works alternate with sets from Nonclassical's resident DJs. The label's releases adapt classical music to an EDM format, featuring new classical compositions and electronic remixes of these works. Bates presents Mercury Soul, a party in nightclubs that links DJ sets of EDM with live classical sets via composed, electro-acoustic interludes; these nights involve a director, conductor, and a chamber ensemble from a major symphony. Yellow Lounge situates older classical music in nightclubs and employs DJs who spin classical works between live sets. Ari Benjamin Meyers composes instrumental-EDM, music that features classically influenced composition with a dance focus, and has performed it with his Redux Orchestra in Berlin's late night dance clubs from 2005-2012. Brandt Brauer Frick, an EDM trio, formed an 11-piece ensemble of mostly classical instruments that plays their orchestrated techno-like tracks in clubs and concert halls. </p><p>Using social and performance analysis, the chapter describes these phenomena as musical and social hybridity. Club classical and instrumental-EDM evince a desire on the part of event planners and classically trained composers to connect on a more physical and social level with their audience. Many of the composers and presenters express a wish that through these practices, classical music can expand beyond the concert hall and potentially see a demographic change in its audience over time. The chapter also delves into the narrow demographics of the classical-EDM scene, the difficulties of instrumental-EDM, and situates the author's dissertation composition, <italic>Alleys Of Your Mind</italic>, and its presentation at the Duke Coffeehouse, within the greater practice of instrumental-EDM. </p><p>Chapter 3 presents edited versions of the author's interviews with the study's four primary research subjects. This documentation, and the dissertation as a whole, is paired with a website, <underline>composersonthedecks.org</underline>, which provides additional information, photographs, links, and audio and video of <italic>Alleys Of Your Mind</italic>.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of Contemporary Music Studies, 2007. / Bibliography: p. 291-313.

Thesis (D. Mus. Arts)--University of Washington, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [55]-58).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Tammy L. Anderson, Dept. of Sociology and Criminal Justice. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed Jan. 12, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references: P. 111-117.

xxiii, 507 p. / This dissertation contextualizes melodic variation within a cultural, historical, and cognitive framework. This work discusses how traditional musicians learn how to vary melodies by observing norms of social and musical behavior exhibited by senior musicians. The core of this dissertation is the transcription and analysis of fifty source recordings of fifty different Irish musicians playing one tune each dating from between 1904 and 2007. Though the transcriptions of the recordings exhibited a high instance of melodic variation (48.2% of the measures), only a small percentage of variation fell on set accented tones (an average of 7.3%). The considerable invariance of set accented tones suggests that part of what constitutes the concept of a tune in an Irish musician's mind relates to the pitch of these key tones. I introduce the term aesthetic conservatism to designate a philosophical approach to performance practice that seeks to maintain both the dance genre and tune identity. I argue that aesthetic conservatism may be a by-product of archetypes and exemplars created through transcriptions and recording technology. This conservatism may also be a function of famine-induced fear of cultural dissolution or inferiority with respect to more prominent music-making supercultures. I call on the philosophy of aesthetic conservatism to explain why few set accented tones are varied. Of the measures that were varied, 74% of those variations involved the addition, subtraction, or redistribution of ornamentation. To catalogue the variety of variations within this sample, I propose a taxonomy that is designed to account for the number of notes in a measure and to assess intervallic differences over successive repetitions of a tune. Finally, I propose a theory to explain the cognitive processes that allow a musician to vary a melody. I suggest that in the mind of a traditional musician there is both a tune schema and a variation schema. These are flexible models that are distinct and separate but that interact within a short span of time because of the exceptionally efficient anatomy of a musician's brain. / Committee in charge: Anne Dhu McLucas, Chairperson; Lori Kruckenberg, Member; Stephen Rodgers, Member; Glen Waddell, Outside Member

The purpose of this thesis is to describe, analyze and compare traditional and new marketing tools of music industry, focusing on distribution and promotion, and demonstrate through an example of succes of electronic dance music in recent years that digital era and internet development have significant influence on mujsic marketing. Based on analysis and primary research reveal basic segments of listeners and recommend a mix of tools for a starting artist.